Child pays in many one-parent homes

Nov. 24, 2012

Written by

David

STOEFFLER

If poverty in the Ozarks is a “social time bomb,” then the unencumbered growth in single-parent households is the match that lit the fuse.

Parenting is difficult enough for married couples. Personally, I can’t imagine raising my daughter without my wife to more than share the duties of care, feeding, nurturing and running around. And having two incomes — even in those early, paycheck-to-paycheck years — meant our daughter never had to miss a meal, plus had books and toys to stimulate her young mind.

But an increasing number of people — mostly women — are going it alone as parents for a large chunk of their children’s lives.

As reporter Kathryn Wall details in her insightful stories starting on today’s front page, being single in some cases is a better alternative to staying in a bad situation, especially if the children are at risk.

Clearly, though, the data show it is more likely that a single parent is going to be raising that child in poverty.

A fascinating trend is the increasing number of women choosing birth out of wedlock. While the couple is unwilling to commit to the relationship, they are willing to risk raising a child alone.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, citing Census data, states that a child born to married parents is 80 percent less likely to live in poverty than a child born out of wedlock.

Conservatives are right to lament this trend. In his controversial book, “Coming Apart,” author Charles Murray concludes that American society is “coming apart at the seams — not seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.”

Among his several arguments, the most compelling is that “marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.” Murray uses more than 40 years of data to show that the “elite” class consists largely of married people, while the lower class is increasingly unmarried — including a large number of never-married parents.

(Page 2 of 2)

This has obvious ramifications for the child — and for society as a whole.

Beyond the risk of living in poverty, statistics show that child is more likely to do poorly in school, to experience violence, commit a crime or become involved with drugs. That child also is more likely to end up in poverty as an adult.

In this era, two incomes are often necessary to provide a decent living for a family, leading to single-parent households increasingly dependent on government support: food stamps, child care subsidies, etc.

Tim Knapp, a sociology professor at Missouri State University, sees the strong link between single-parent families and rising poverty.

“The fact that one-quarter to one-third of Greene County children under the age of five are living in poverty is a social time bomb,” Knapp says.

And, he acknowledges, “you are not wrong when you say out-of-wedlock births contribute to childhood poverty. ...”

“But,” Knapp adds, “how does acknowledging that help kids who are poor today? ... The kids did not ask to be born into a single-parent family.”

Indeed, this is the critical dilemma facing families, churches, nonprofits and policy makers.

Whenever a program is launched to help poor children — for instance, expanding school breakfast programs — people decry the growth in the “nanny state.” A proposal to expand offerings for early childhood education is met with opposition to “social engineering.”

How do we break the cycle of poverty and get parents (it takes two, you know) to take responsibility — without making the most innocent victims in this story pay the price?